“We have given an awful exhibition of slaughter and destruction, which may serve as a warning to all mankind,” he said on the House floor, lamenting the passenger pigeon’s impending extinction. Lacey of Iowa helped pass the Lacey Act, the nation’s first wildlife protection law. The years leading up to Martha’s death marked a shift in the country’s attitude toward endangered species. We even have a word for animals like Martha: “endling,” meaning the last of her kind. Close to a thousand animal species alone have died off in the last 500 years, and the prognosis is only getting worse. More recently dubbed the “sixth mass extinction,” our modern, human-dominated era has been marked by an acceleration in species loss. But Martha’s high-profile death trained national attention on an alarming new-and, until then, largely ignored-trend. For as long as the Earth has sustained life-some 3.5 billion years-so too has it seen the permanent disappearance of life forms, the dinosaurs being a particularly extreme example. Of course, the real tragedy was that the loss of the passenger pigeon was neither surprising nor unique. “ A keeper making his daily visit to the bird’s cage found that the thread by which life had hung for weeks had snapped, and forthwith the news was sent out over the wires of the great press associations, for the loss of Martha, last of a vanished race, was as interesting to the world in some respects as the death of a potentate.” An obituary in the New York Tribune read: on September 1, 1914, Martha fell from her perch, never to rise again-one of the rare occasions in which historians could pinpoint the exact moment of a species’ extinction. ![]() So desperate were her caretakers to continue her lineage that they offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find her a viable mate. Martha, who’d grown up in captivity, had no offspring of her own. In a matter of decades, a bird that once numbered in the billions was reduced to a few captive flocks-and then, eventually, to one. By the late 1800s, hunting pigeons had become a booming business that was aided by two new technologies: the telegraph and the railroad. An agricultural pest and reliable source of protein, they became easy targets for hunters who slaughtered them in the tens of thousands, sometimes simply by swatting at them with poles. Ironically, the passenger pigeons’ very abundance may have spelled their demise. They were a terrifying and seemingly indestructible force of nature. In their wake, the passenger pigeons left a path of tornado-like destruction: toppled trees, razed crops, droppings several inches thick. Livestock scattered, children ran home, adults dropped to their knees and prayed. Witnesses compared it to stampeding horses or a train rumbling through a tunnel. Traveling at 60 miles an hour in flocks a mile wide and 300 miles long, the mere sound of the pigeons’ passing inspired whisperings of apocalypse. ![]() ![]() “The light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow.” “The air was literally filled with Pigeons,” recalled prominent naturalist John James Audubon about a flock numbering in the billions. Named for their migratory behavior, they flew in enormous, almost biblical, masses that could take days to pass overhead and were known to darken the entire sky. ![]() There was a time not long before when her kind accounted for more than a quarter of the birds in North America and may have been the most abundant bird species on the planet. After the death of her companion George in 1910, Martha had become the world’s last-living passenger pigeon. With her muddy-gray plumage and mottled wings, Martha may not have looked the part of an animal celebrity, but she was hardly average-in fact, she was the very definition of one of a kind. Perched on her humble roost at the Cincinnati Zoo, she was an object of fascination to the thousands of visitors who lined up just to catch a glimpse. It was the early 1900s, shortly before the United States entered the First World War, and Martha was at the height of her fame. THE MOST BELOVED BIRD IN HISTORY may very well have been a 29-year-old pigeon by the name of Martha.
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